Starting with distinctions between
global history and globalization and
between the history of childhood and the history
of children, this essay
suggests some approaches to the global history of
childhood. It calls
for exploring the common circumstances of
childhood; the
dissemination of practices, norms, and customs
affecting children; the
impact on children of webs of connections across
nations and
continents; and the cultural encounters that result.
By doing this,
students of childhood in any place or time can
establish frameworks
through which to recognize and address important
aspects of global
history and theories of global change.

Globalization has produced a common
vision of the experience of childhood, a kind of
global "morality." However, this "global notion"
fails to coincide with the experience of
childhood in Latin America.
In Latin America family and kinship
have served as critical
institutions for social stability. Perhaps the
starkest example of the impact of
globalization on children in Latin America is the
growing number of so-called street
children. While the nuclear family is widely seen
as ideal, it is not prevalent. Latin
American families which are often extended and
matrifocal often appear in the media or
popular literature as being "deviant" or "in
crisis." Neoliberal reforms restrict social
programs that support education, welfare,
housing, and medical care. Nevertheless,
children still utilize kinship and family relations in
creative and adaptive ways. Structures
of dependence and reciprocity sustain children in
the wake of economic crisis, marital
strife, and parental death or disappearance.
Parents also depend upon children. The
majority of "street children" are working in the
street to bring resources to their families.
Globalization has limited the ability of popular
families in Latin America to participate in
the formal society and economy; what it has not
done is to destroy the family.

This essay explores the linkage between modern
children's consumer culture and
the globalization of the design and manufacture of
playthings. While toy production and
innovation were centered in Germany from the
17th through 19th centuries, it shifted to the
U.S. and Japan, recently to China in the 20th
century. The authors chronicle why the U.S.
and Japan drifted from production to product
design and marketing and how China
became the locus of manufacturing in the last 20
years. Playthings have long roots in
local folk cultures and crafts, and regional and
national traditions of toy and doll making
have long reinforced ethnic and local identities in
children. But the construction of
modern childhood over the past century especially
has paralleled the decline of these
craft traditions and the emergence of a global
children's commercial culture.

In Madagascar, the cultural and economic changes
that have accompanied economic
liberalization have also seen the emergence of the
jaombilo, a young man supported by
the money that a woman earns from sex work. In
this article, I explore the structural
forces that have contributed to the emergence of
the jaombilo as well as the more
subjective process through which young men
become jaombilo. I argue that the category
of the jaombilo emerged because of the particular
ways in which global economic change
articulates with local conceptions of youth, gender
and economy. I further suggest that
the case of the jaombilo challenges the
assumption that youth is a normative phase on the
way to adulthood. Instead, I argue that for young
men in Madagascar, youth is a phase
that they cannot escape. Much as savages were
figured as "children" in the 19th century
evolutionary discourse, many contemporary Malagasy
young men have become perpetual
youth, and perpetually poor, thereby challenging
normative models of human
development that emerged in the context of
modernity.

This article examines how new, globally-inflected
patterns of consumption
among young people in the state of
Kerala, India are configured in relation to a specifically
postcolonial cultural politics of gender, class, and caste,
rooted in the colonialist and nationalist projects. Rather
than focus on the presence or absence of agency and/or
resistance within consuming practices, the article elucidates
the cultural-political terrain into which consumption as an
objectified field of practice is inserted. By paying attention
to this terrain, it becomes possible to examine the
contradictions of consumption for young women and men who are
both objects of commoditization and subjects of consumption.
The article locates consumption within larger discursive domains,
at both the national and regional level, which contest the
meaning of globalization in ways that produce and circulate
highly gendered constructions of consumer agency. Drawing on
ethnographic material on gender, youth, and consumption in Kerala,
the article traces the intersecting gender, class, and caste terrain
that underlies this field of consumption. Negotiating the space of
consumption under new conditions of globalization entails traversing
a gendered terrain of masculinities and femininities in ways that
reveal the link among youth, consumption, and globalization to be
a fraught and contradictory.

Despite popular images of the adverse disruptions
caused by
migration in today's global world, the migration of
children in
the contemporary world often repeats patterns
from the past.
We are also witnessing genuinely new elements.
In either case, to
understand and evaluate these matters requires
historical
understanding of childhood
and knowledge about earlier migrations, such as
those of the 17th,
18th, and 19th centuries. Important areas affected
by migration with
significant consequences for children include
education, social mobility,
family authority, gender roles, and the potential
contributions that
older children can make to strategies for family
success and survival.
Changes in these areas have resulted in important
social transformations and
can be expected to do so again. Understanding
contemporary globalization
should involve the knowledge of American
historians especially because of
the long experience in the United States with
many of the factors
associated with globalization that are currently
being played out
around the world. The paper looks at how the
American experience with
migration in the context of free market economic
activity and of
the resulting interpenetration of many cultures can
help us to frame
questions about migration and globalization
today.

This article examines the global impact of the
1989 UN Convention on
the Rights of the Child and questions why the US
has not been a
signatory. The ambivalent history of children's
rights in the
United States is reviewed with special attention to
the unique
situation of child slavery and other legal forms of
child servitude
for the first two hundred years. The recent legal
controversies over
children's participatory rights and privacy are also
examined within
the context of the Convention.

This article explores the creation of a concept of
childhood in Japan during the 19th and
early 20th centuries. Despite the claims of modern
Japanese commentators to the contrary,
childhood as a distinct phase of life was not
entirely absent from the Japanese cultural
landscape. During Japan's early modern period,
social and economic changes brought
increased attention to children, resulting in the
growth of schooling and child-centered
rituals. Nonetheless, concepts of childhood were
transformed by Japan's engagement
with globalization in the second half of the 19th
century. This engagement took place in
the context of Western imperialism, which
presented Japanese leaders with institutional
models that generated wide-spread interest in
childhood. Especially critical were the
nation-state, which created the imperative of
mobilizing individuals—and, by extension,
children—in service of the state, and the school,
which provided a means for
accomplishing that goal. By the 1890s, schools,
along with other social and economic
changes resulting from Japan's integration into the
system of global capitalism, had
begun to generate new sensibilities regarding
childhood. At the same time, social
commentators in Japan began to participate in an
international debate about issues
relating to childhood, and found an eager
domestic audience for their voices among the
urban middle class.

This essay asks first whether schooling is truly a
global phenomenon and then, if so, how
global schooling affects children's experiences
and cultural conceptions of childhood.
World culture theorists argue that Western-style
schooling is global not only because it
touches most children in the world today but
because its diffusion has been seen, since
the 1950s, as inevitable. Granted, classroom
experience varies tremendously from
country from to country and from the global
North to the global South; indeed, it seems
as though many children in the North would
prefer to escape from school while many
children in the South clamor to get in. Schools
around the world thus have little in
common except a vaguely similar form:
age-graded, co-educational, "egg-carton" classes
in which teachers rely mainly on lecture-recitation
and seatwork. Nonetheless, I propose,
the flimsy common form of global schooling has
an impact on children's experiences—on what
they learn, how they develop socially, and how
they are sorted into adult
statuses. It also shapes our conceptions of
childhood, I suggest, by introducing new traits
such as "maturity" and by leading adults to divide
childhood into micro age grades.

Efforts to promote a more individualistic model
of childhood, pressed on Leba-
non from a variety of outside
sources including the United Nations, have affected parents
and children in Lebanon. At the same time, however, a more
collective, family-centered identity continues to have
great force. This essay, based on inquiries in two different
local settings, discusses the resultant tensions and
combinations over recent decades.

The article shows that geography is still destiny
for millions of children. Based on global
UN data about various demographic factors and
the urban explosion after 1950, the
geography of regional poverty and power reveals
three major trends. First, over 50
percent of the world population will live in cities
after 2007. Second, by 2030, the cities
of the poor countries of the world will house four
times as many people as the cities of
the well-to-do countries. Third, the population
living in urban slums—the most rapidly
growing structure of the urban landscape in the
less developed world—will double to
almost 2 billion in the next 15 years. The rifting
apart of affluent and poor urban
environments thus marks the "uneven globality"
of children today. A theoretical note on
global homogenization, its political potential and
differential force in the socionatural
system of global technoscience and local cultures,
concludes this contribution.

On July 21, 1903, some two hundred labourers
recently recruited to construct the Benguet
Road linking the Americans' erstwhile summer
capital of the Philippines at Baguio with the
railhead to Manila refused to report for work and
peremptorily marched out of camp. While
the incident is barely if at all remembered, it
became something of a cause célèbre
at the time.
The affair was made much of by a nationalist
press owned by Manila-based literati deeply
involved in non-military confrontation with the
new colonial administration. The Americans
were equally as anxious to prove they were
different to other colonial regimes and that
nothing was amiss. The workers, of course, the
obreros simply disappear once again into the
historical twilight but not before leaving behind
them a glimpse at the changes that were
taking place in the local labour market. While it
may be premature to talk about the dawning
of a distinctive worker consciousness as yet, there
were significant socio-economic
developments in Filipino society at this time that
were just as significant as the much more
contestable political ones. It is against these wider
considerations that the events surrounding
the recruitment of labour on the road are played
out. Named after the chief recruitment agent,
Pascual Poblete, the affair is one of those rare
occasions when long term historical
developments at work in the less visible strata of
late colonial society come to the surface.

This paper examines the links between the
construction of masculinity and the male body
in eighteenth century Spain. It scrutinizes
unpublished cases of annulments due to
impotency in
a northern Spanish church court between 1650
and 1750, in the diocese of Calahorra and La
Calzada. The proceedings against a
hermaphrodite, several castrates, and many
impotent men
are explored thoroughly. The author follows the
lead of James Farr and Joan Scott, agreeing
with them that refining sexual differences
reinforced social order and hierarchy in
Counter-Reformation Europe. But, instead of examining
how this was done to clarify the male/female
binary hierarchy, the author applies this conceptualization
to argue that there were also progressively
more reified definitions of manhood in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The article
concludes that a legal confidence in the medical
profession during the eighteenth century focused
attention on the male body and allowed authorities
to expose "unmanly" bodies. Communities
called upon an increasingly self-assured medical
profession to diagnose the physical attributes of
non-masculinity, in much the same way they
would describe the unhealthy, the abnormal, or
the
insane.

Ottaway, Susannah R., 1967- Decline of life: old age in eighteenth-century England.

Marriage -- England -- History -- Sources.

Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 19th century.

Abstract:

The books reviewed variously convey notions of
reform and momentous social change in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries.
Law and lawyers, gender/family,
and demographic change are recurring topics in several
works. Three—Finn's, Bailey's, and Ottaway's—complement
each other in their treatment of family, consumption,
welfare, household, and money matters. Ottoway's analysis
fills an important gap in both poor law literature and
the social history of aging in the eighteenth century.
Bailey's contribution in marriage history is her focus on the
'middling sort' rather than the well-documented aristocracy.
Bums' and Innes' "fresh look" at the 'age of reform'
includes art, theater, opera, medicine, and empire as well
as parliamentary reform. Clearly, the most varied
content is to be found in Floud's and Johnson's The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, an update
of an earlier work while the most original piece is Peter
Lindert's. Described by Jeffrey Sachs as
"dazzling" (which it is), Growing Public is essentially
about the welfare state and its various metamorphoses.